Seeing Slowly: What a Hmong Wedding in Sa Pa Taught Me About Joy

Deana Kotiga is an anthropologist, documentary photographer and writer whose work is rooted in over a decade of studying human behaviour. Her focus lies in the everyday — in how people move through the world, how they interact with their environments and each other, and how meaning is made in moments we often overlook. Bridging academic research with creative practice, her camera isn’t drawn to spectacle, but to stillness — to the quiet details that speak volumes about a place. In her new series, Seeing Slowly, for Something Curated, Kotiga explores the meeting point of travel, visual anthropology and storytelling.

It was later than I’d thought when I woke up. The air in the room was crisp, mountain-fresh, the light pouring in softly through the windows. I rolled out of bed and peeked outside: green hills unravelled like brushstrokes, as if someone had sketched them half-dreaming. I was in Sa Pa, in northern Vietnam, having taken a couple of days to escape the heat and busyness of the cities. I’d been travelling for a visual anthropology project. Stimulating, yes, but the kind of work that leaves you craving real silence, not just absence of sound.

I wanted to stay at a home-stay, and I found Bau, my host, scouring the vastness of the internet. A travel blog promised “the warmest host, amazing trekking, and mean pancakes”. I booked it immediately.

Downstairs, Bau was already up, balancing her toddler while flipping pancakes. On the table: slices of sun-yellow mango. I picked one up; it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. “Would you like to come to a wedding today?” she asked casually, as if this were everyday.

A wedding?

In Sa Pa?

Yes, please.

She slipped into the traditional dress she’d made herself, wrapped her one-year-old daughter in a sling, and handed me a helmet. Her daughter nestled between us, we rode off on her scooter into the folds of the mountains.

Anthropology, at its core, is the art of wonder. You begin with the “extraordinary”: the unfamiliar, the eccentric, the things we find easy to marvel at. And then, slowly, over time, you learn to linger on the “ordinary”. That act of paying attention, the art of learning how to see and where to look is what shapes our work as anthropologists.

But witnessing isn’t enough. We feel compelled to write. Not because we fully understand something, far from it, but because we want to make sense of it. Language barriers, cultural nuance, incomplete context – we’re acutely aware of all that escapes us. And still, we write. To remember. To document. To say: we were here.

That day in Sa Pa, many details slipped through the cracks. I didn’t speak Hmong, but that, strangely, became a gift. I focused on what I could see: gesture, rhythm, material. It’s what every photographer dreams of: a world revealed through presence, not translation.

When we arrived, the celebration was already well underway. The groom’s family had come to the bride’s home for lễ xin dâu, a formal request to take her away. During this, Bau explained, gifts are exchanged between families and negotiated by elders. Still widely practised, it’s a tradition that acknowledges the bride’s value and compensates her family for the life and labour she brings to her new home.

There was food without end, and drink flowed freely. I was invited to sit and eat – but I was more drawn to what was happening inside the house. Men were shouting over each other in what looked like a game, followed almost always by someone downing a drink. Bau laughed. “It’s a quiz,” she told me. Male relatives from the groom’s side must answer questions posed by the bride’s family: about customs, family, or personal details. Every wrong answer means a shot. “It’s a test,” she smiled, “to see if they’re really ready to join the family.”

The bride and groom, high-school sweethearts,  were in front of the house. Greeting the guests, they were dressed in traditional Hmong attire: handmade hemp clothes from hemp that their mothers had grown, harvested, dyed, and woven themselves; jewellery, often made by male family members who worked as welders. These garments weren’t just meant to be beautiful: they were declarations. Markers of identity. Material memory.

At one point, the couple disappeared and re-emerged: a white tux, and a frothy princess grown. “To look like Koreans,” Bau said, with a sly smile. People posed for photos. Within minutes, the Korean-inspired outfits were off, replaced by their original traditional wear. The wedding, I was told, would last for days.

What struck me wasn’t just the visual poetry of the event, but the politics of it. “I am not Viet,” Bau told me that morning, while we were riding her scooter, “I am Hmong.”

The Hmong are one of Vietnam’s many ethnic minorities. Vietnam officially recognises 54 ethnic groups, with the Kinh (or Viet) being the majority. The Hmong have long lived in the mountainous regions of northern Vietnam, Laos, and southern China. Historically, they’ve been treated as peripheral, both geographically and politically. Their culture, language, and spiritual practices were often deemed “backward” by official policy. Education and healthcare access remained limited, and many were displaced from their ancestral lands.

And yet here was Bau – my age, but a mother of four, a guide, a cook, a seamstress, a host, a linguist – carving out a livelihood on her own terms. She speaks three languages: Hmong, her mother tongue; Vietnamese, which she learned in school; and English, which she taught herself so she could work with tourists.

The joy I witnessed that day wasn’t naïve or escapist. It was layered and intentional. This was joy as resistance. Joy that insists on memory. That claims space. Joy that survives, and flourishes.

Rituals, as anthropologists well know, are the scaffolding of any society. They reinforce norms, but also offer openings for transformation. They guide individuals through liminal moments: from child to adult, single to partnered, outsider to insider. The same with marriage. In many cultures, marriage is a bridge from one family into another. A renegotiation of identity and belonging.

What struck me most in Sa Pa wasn’t how different the wedding was from ones I’d seen in Croatia, the UK, or Colombia – but how similar. Not in form, but in function. Weddings everywhere are little mirrors allowing us to rehearse and perform the world we want to believe in.

I spent only a few hours at the wedding, but I carry it with me. The smell of rice wine. The hem of Bau’s dress flapping in the wind. The earrings I was gifted. We didn’t speak much, but I’d like to think I understood enough.

And in that thin line – between the seen and the unsaid – is where the best stories live.



Photography by Deana Kotiga